It's got a cool car - a Shelby Super Snake version of the Ford Mustang.

It has an unusual city setting - Sofia, Bulgaria.

And then Selena Gomez shows up as the mouthy, tech-savvy sidekick dragged along for a long, Christmas season chase through the not-quite-generic (tramlines, train tracks) mean streets of Sofia.

That's where the silly kicks in. Things turn pulse-pounding in the third act, but that's entirely too late to rescue this end-of-summer orphan.

The improbable set-up: Disgraced racing driver Brent Magna's Bulgarian wife (Rebecca Budig) has been kidnapped. He gets a call and is told to steal a particular armored, camera-packed Mustang he will drive on a series of "tasks."

The villain, whose chin stubble and martini-slurping lips are all we see, is played by Jon Voight with a German accent.

Having a car covered with cameras raises the variety of shots and sometimes amps up the pulse-pounding nature of the chases, choreographed by Charlie Picerni. Until you notice door mirrors that popped off the Mustang in the last chase magically return in the next scene.

A guy whose wife has been kidnapped and threatened with death should be a lot more worked up and manic than Hawke plays this fellow. And one would think that a young woman snatched for a ride-along would be freaking at this or that hair-raising chase, the streets filling with wrecked Bulgarian cop cars, the machine-gunning motorcyclists and what not. The leads don't turn up the requisite adrenalin-jacked pitch of their voices or their acting. They're really in that car, but they're entirely too calm about all this mayhem.

Director Courtney Solo-mon is plainly out of his depth, and when the always reliable Hawke plays a character in the wrong key, that points back to a director who doesn't have the stature or standing to "direct" him.

Maybe they all took a gander at that random, ridiculous scenario and hoped that the car would be cool enough to bail them out. It isn't.